Two weeks blurred into a fever dream of sweat and blood and stolen moments.
Leo fought twice more at the Colosseum. The first opponent was a former dockworker named Rook, slow but built like a concrete pylon. Leo danced around him for six rounds, landing body shots until Rook's ribs gave out and he crumpled to the canvas with a sound like wet cardboard collapsing. The second was a wiry man called Ferro who moved like a snake and struck like one too—Leo won that fight on points, his left eye swollen shut and three of Ferro's teeth scattered across the canvas like discarded dice.
His purse grew. Four thousand for Rook. Six thousand for Ferro. Combined with the initial two thousand and the side bets he placed on himself through a shady bookmaker named Oleg who operated out of a laundromat on Vostok Avenue, Leo had accumulated nearly fifteen thousand crowns. It was still a long way from fifty-seven, but it was closer than he'd been in months.
Lena noticed the bruises. She always noticed.
"You're fighting again," she said one evening, her voice flat. The hospital room was dim, the curtains drawn against the gray Ashford afternoon. "Don't lie to me, Leo. We promised."
Leo sat in the plastic chair beside her bed, his hands wrapped in fresh bandages. "I found a gym. Underground circuit. Nothing serious."
"Nothing serious." She reached out and touched his swollen eye with fingertips so light he barely felt them. "You look like you went ten rounds with a freight train."
"Freight train looked worse."
She didn't laugh. "What kind of gym pays you to get beaten?"
The question hung between them. Leo could see her putting the pieces together—the sudden cash for the hospital's down payment, the late nights, the injuries that didn't match "sparring accidents."
"Lena—"
"Don't." She turned her face toward the window. "Don't tell me it's fine. Don't tell me you're doing this for me. I know you're doing this for me. That's what makes it unbearable."
They sat in silence. The monitors beeped. Outside, the pawnshop sign flickered its one-eyed promise.
"I saw something," Leo said finally. "At the fights. A boy. Maybe fourteen, fifteen. They're keeping him there. Making him fight."
Lena turned back. "What?"
"His name is Sam. He's a foster kid—I don't know the whole story, but I've been watching. Listening. He's been moved through the system, and somehow he ended up in the Colosseum. They treat him like property."
"What are you going to do?"
Leo looked at his bandaged hands. "I don't know yet."
But he did know. Every night after his fights, while the patrons drank champagne and the other fighters counted their money, Leo crept through the bowels of the old textile mill. He learned the guard rotations. He mapped the locked doors and the blind corners. He discovered a ventilation shaft that led from the locker room to the corridor outside Sam's cell—too narrow for an adult, but wide enough to whisper through.
On the third visit, Sam spoke back.
"Who's there?" The boy's voice was hoarse, barely a whisper through the metal grille.
"Someone who wants to help."
A long pause. "People always say that."
"I know. I'm not people." Leo pressed his face against the vent. "Your name is Sam. You've been in the foster system for two years. Before that, you lived with your grandmother in the Ironbrook district until she got sick. You like dogs but you've never been allowed to have one. You draw pictures on napkins when you're nervous."
Another pause, longer this time. "How do you know that?"
"I listened. The guards talk. The woman who runs this place, Vesna, she keeps files on everyone. I found yours in her office last week."
"You broke into Vesna's office?" There was something almost like wonder in Sam's voice.
"I'm a mechanic. I know how to pick locks." Leo allowed himself a grim smile. "Sam, I need to understand how you got here. You were in state care. How did you end up in a cage?"
The silence stretched so long Leo thought Sam had stopped listening. Then, very quietly, the boy began to speak.
"They called it a transfer. I was in a group home on Meridian Street. The social worker—a man named Felton—he came one day and said I was being moved to a special program. For kids with 'behavioral challenges.' He said it would be better. I signed a paper. I don't even remember what it said."
"Felton. First name?"
"Graham. Graham Felton. He works for the Department of Family Services. The Veridian Department." Sam's voice cracked. "He brought me here. Said I'd be trained. Said I'd learn discipline. Instead they put gloves on my hands and threw me in the ring against a man twice my size. I lost. I always lose. But the patrons like watching me fight because I'm small and I look scared. That's the whole point."
Leo felt something cold and hard settle in his chest. "The Kennel. What is that?"
Sam's breathing hitched. "How do you know about that?"
"I heard guards talking. They said some kids get sent to The Kennel if they can't fight anymore. Or if they cause too much trouble."
"It's... it's a place. I don't know where. But I've heard them. Kids go there and they don't come back to the Colosseum. They just disappear from the system entirely. Erased. Like they never existed."
"Can you get me more? Names, dates, case numbers?"
"Maybe. They leave paperwork in the guard station sometimes. I can see it from my cell when they take me to the showers. But why do you care? You don't even know me."
Leo pressed his palm flat against the metal vent. "Because someone should. Because the whole world looked away, and someone needs to look back."
For the first time, something shifted in Sam's voice. Not hope, exactly—he was too damaged for hope. But something adjacent to it. "I'll try. But if they catch me..."
"They won't."
Leo left the mill that night with Sam's words echoing in his skull: transferred, erased, like they never existed.
—
Three miles away, in a brick office building on Kestrel Street, another kind of battle was being waged.
Elena Marsh and Diana Vance sat across from their attorney, Samuel Brooker, in a conference room lined with law books and the faint smell of old coffee. Elena, a structural engineer with calloused hands and a warm smile, held Diana's hand tightly. Diana, a pediatric nurse who had seen too many children pass through the system without finding homes, stared at the documents spread across the table with an expression of exhausted fury.
The rejection letter from the Veridian Department of Family Services sat on top of the pile like a paperweight made of prejudice.
"Your application for foster care licensure has been denied," Brooker read aloud, though they all knew the words by heart, "due to concerns regarding the suitability of the household environment for a developing child. The Department maintains a policy of placing children in homes that reflect traditional family structures, as this has been determined to serve the best interests of the child."
"'Traditional family structures,'" Diana repeated. "That's their way of saying we're lesbians."
"That's exactly what it is," Brooker said. He was a thin man in his forties, prematurely gray, with the weary determination of someone who had spent his career fighting losing battles and occasionally winning them. He had been referred to them by the Southern Equality Alliance, a legal advocacy group that had been tracking VDFS's discriminatory practices for years. "And thanks to the discovery process, we now have proof."
He slid a document across the table.
It was an internal memorandum, printed on VDFS letterhead and dated eighteen months earlier. The subject line read: "Policy Guidance on Placement Criteria in Light of Recent Social Developments." The author was listed as Dr. Margaret Holloway, Director of Child Welfare Standards.
Brooker pointed to a paragraph near the bottom. "Read this."
Elena leaned forward. "'While judicial rulings at the federal level have altered the legal definition of marriage, the Department retains discretion to assess the moral fitness of prospective foster parents. Research continues to demonstrate that children thrive best in homes with both maternal and paternal influences. Therefore, it is the Department's position that applications from same-sex couples should be processed with heightened scrutiny, and licensure should be denied unless compelling circumstances dictate otherwise.'"
"Compelling circumstances," Diana said bitterly. "Translation: unless we can prove we're somehow different from every other same-sex couple."
"Keep reading," Brooker said. "The next section is what matters."
Elena continued. The memo shifted from policy language to something more mundane—a list of "resource allocation adjustments" and "off-book welfare placement authorizations." There were columns of numbers: case file identifiers, transfer codes, budget line items. Nothing overtly incriminating, but the pattern was strange.
"I don't understand," Elena said. "What are these numbers?"
Brooker pulled out another document—a spreadsheet he had compiled over the past two weeks. "I cross-referenced these case numbers with the public foster care registry. Look at the pattern. Every child whose file number appears on this list was transferred out of the standard foster system within six months. They were flagged as 'behaviorally challenged' or 'difficult to place,' then moved to a private contractor for 'specialized residential care.' After that transfer, their files go dark. No follow-up. No adoption processing. No emancipation records. They just... stop."
Diana's face had gone pale. "How many?"
"Twenty-seven over the past three years. Maybe more. The coding system uses a cipher that's designed to look like standard bureaucratic notation. It took me a week to even realize it was a cipher." Brooker tapped the document. "This isn't just a discriminatory policy memo. This is evidence of a pipeline. Someone in VDFS is systematically routing vulnerable children out of the system and into God knows what."
"Where are they going?" Elena asked.
"That's the question. The memo references a facility called 'The Kennel' in coded language—it took me three passes to identify the cipher for that word alone. I have no idea what or where The Kennel is, but whatever it is, it's off the books entirely. No state inspection records. No licensing. Nothing."
Elena felt a chill that had nothing to do with the office air conditioning. "You're saying VDFS is selling children?"
"I'm saying I don't know. But I know that this memo was written by someone high up in the department. And I know that when we file our motion for summary judgment in the discrimination case, we can subpoena the full records. If there's a criminal conspiracy here, sunlight is the best disinfectant."
Diana squeezed Elena's hand. "Do it. Whatever it takes."
Brooker nodded and began gathering the documents. "There's one more thing. I've heard through a contact that there's a missing persons report on a foster child named Sam—no last name in the file. Age estimated at fourteen or fifteen. Last seen at a group home on Meridian Street. The detective assigned to the case is a man named Frank Morrow. If we can connect our case to a specific missing child, it strengthens our argument immensely. I'm going to reach out to him."
—
Detective Frank Morrow was a man who had stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago.
Thirty-two years on the Ashford Police Force had taught him that the world was a simple place, governed by simple rules. Men were violent. Women were manipulative. Children were victims until they became perpetrators. And anyone who tried to complicate that worldview was either naive or had an agenda.
He sat at his desk in the precinct house on Harbinger Street, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow and the missing persons file on "Sam" spread before him. The boy had no last name in the system—a bureaucratic error, according to the group home, though Morrow had seen plenty of "errors" that were actually deliberate obstructions. The file was thin: intake photos showing a dark-haired boy with hollow eyes, a brief history of placements, a transfer authorization signed by one Graham Felton, and then nothing. The boy had simply vanished from the records.
Morrow had been working the case for three weeks with nothing to show for it. The group home staff were unhelpful. Felton had been transferred to a different district and wasn't returning calls. The Department of Family Services had sent a form letter expressing concern and promising cooperation while providing absolutely nothing of substance.
Then the call had come from Samuel Brooker's office.
Now Morrow stared at the memorandum that Brooker had faxed over—the same memo with the coded entries, the same list of case numbers, the same references to "The Kennel." Brooker had been practically vibrating with excitement, talking about conspiracy and child trafficking and a landmark civil rights case that would blow the lid off VDFS corruption.
Morrow saw something entirely different.
He saw a lawyer trying to manufacture evidence to win a discrimination lawsuit. He saw a lesbian couple with a political agenda, using a missing child as a prop for their cause. He saw a memo that could easily be a forgery—the language was too neat, the "cipher" too convenient, the whole thing reeking of fabrication designed to embarrass a government agency.
"The deviant couple," he muttered to himself, using a term he would never speak aloud in public. Morrow wasn't a bigot in his own mind—he simply believed in the natural order of things. Men and women. Mothers and fathers. Children needed both. That wasn't hatred; that was biology. And people who tried to pretend otherwise were either confused or deliberately destructive.
He looked again at the file on his desk. But instead of focusing on the memorandum, his eyes drifted to another document—a background check he had run on a whim. A man named Leo Kovac had been flagged by a patrol officer for suspicious activity near the old textile mill on Harrow Street. The officer had let him go, but the report mentioned "unexplained cash payments" and "possible involvement in illegal gambling."
Morrow pulled up Kovac's file. Prior arrests: none. Employment: mechanic at Koslov's Garage. Known associates: a woman named Lena Volkov, currently hospitalized at St. Jude's with a terminal heart condition. Financial status: significant medical debt, recently making large cash deposits.
Petty gambling, Morrow thought. A desperate man with a sick girlfriend, scraping together money through underground betting. Not a mastermind. Not a conspirator. Just another low-level criminal trying to game the system.
But the connection to the textile mill nagged at him. The same mill where Sam had supposedly been seen before his disappearance, according to a vague witness statement Morrow had initially dismissed.
He made a decision. He would investigate Leo Kovac. He would ignore the "memorandum" and the lawyer and the couple with their agenda. If there was a crime here, it was a simple one: illegal gambling, maybe some minor racketeering. Not some elaborate conspiracy involving the state government and missing children.
Morrow picked up his phone and dialed the number for the vice squad. "This is Detective Morrow. I need surveillance on a subject. Name's Leo Kovac. I want to know everywhere he goes, everyone he talks to, every cent he spends. And I want it yesterday."
He hung up and looked at the faxed memorandum one more time. Then, with a grunt of disgust, he crumpled it into a ball and tossed it in the trash.
Somewhere in Ashford, a boy named Sam was still missing. And the only person who might have been able to find him had just decided that the evidence pointing to the truth was nothing more than a deviant lie.
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